Bow Down to ARCHIE, Seattle’s Introverted Pop Empress

ARCHIE talks about her stunning Capitol Hill Block Party performance and the arduous work required to be an independent pop artist.

Photo by Eric Tra.

On a platform towering over East Pike Street, a woman clad in a technicolor one-piece straddles a team of eight dancers, their bodies contorted into the shape of a motorcycle. They’re the first act to grace the Main Stage of Capitol Hill Block Party, a three-day festival that often inaugurates the busy season in Seattle. The women on stage are setting the bar high. The sight of that living vehicle forms a spectacular highlight, but it’s not the only one. Not a moment passes by during the set when a body isn’t moving, or a lyric about self-preservation or self-acceptance isn’t being belted into a microphone.

The performance ends with a barn-burner: a capsule of great pop called “Bad Bitch” that’s punctuated by swaying hips and a flowing line of limbs. When it ends, the fans that have lined up hours beforehand to see the day’s headliner, Charli XCX, erupt in applause and tears. The Seattle-born artist has won them over.

Of the seventeen acts scheduled to play the grandest stage at the festival, ARCHIE represents one of only three locals. She’s earned the spot. At the previous Block Party, back in 2019, she did just as much work getting the crowd on her side within the dark confines of Neumo’s. Three years later, she’s returned with a new name and a heightened sense of ambition. In a blinding blonde wig, curls bouncing to the beat, she’s proving to her city of origin that she’s worth paying attention to.

The first time I heard ARCHIE’s music, I was cloistered in my apartment just like everybody else, ruing the proximity to humanity that comes with living in a densely-populated city. She released her 613 EP in 2019, but I discovered it the following year. It might have been the ideal time, as a mandated quarantine forced us to move our social lives online, keeping our anxieties amplified in the Internet’s house of mirrors.

ARCHIE, a self-proclaimed “shycon” (a portmanteau of “shy” and “icon”), writes songs that speak to your inner critic and fly like boomerangs. Hers is the kind of introverted pop music that’s both bold in spirit and grounded in reality, which often makes it genuinely uplifting. 613, which starts with the cabaretesque “Clarity” and ends with an interrobang on “Summation,” stuns in its succinctness. Key among its songs is “Bad Bitch,” a gorgeous track studded with a hefty amount of pathos; were it were released in 2013, it likely would have found Pitchfork coverage. In the burning climate of that particular June, her music was something I needed to hear.

Two years later, I finally get the chance to speak to her face to face. She’s instantly recognizable from 613‘s cover, right down to her striking platinum-blonde locks. We’re sitting in a coffee shop just a block away from the stage she conquered a week ago. She still radiates pride from the effort she and her collaborators – including local choreographer Lex Ramirex – put into the performance. To her, it represents a daunting achievement that’s been in the works for almost a decade.

“If we really wanna go back,” she says, “I’ve been marinating on a show for ten years. I used to be incredibly, incredibly shy, and so I never told anyone I wanted to make music, but I’ve always dreamed of doing something like that. I used to come to Block Party and just dream of being on that stage. So the ideas have gestating for so long.”

“It took a really long time,” she continues. “It took eight months, and we were rehearsing right up until the day before. I was doing rehearsals every single day with different factions of the team, and it was kind of grueling, but it was so fun. I can barely watch the footage now because there’s a million things I would do differently.”

Photo by Eric Tra.

During our talk, ARCHIE comes across as incredibly self-possessed: someone unafraid to flex her talents and able to channel her limitations (namely, her intense introversion) into strengths. Whenever I ask about her budding career as a pop songstress, she replies to my inquiries with confident, honest answers.

For one, she’s acutely aware of the complex connection between her introversion and her desire to perform. It might seem strange that someone so drawn to solitude would want to share themselves so readily in a public space, but to ARCHIE, the bedroom and the stage are one and the same.

“It seems maybe more vulnerable because you’re in front of a bunch of people, but in a way it’s less vulnerable because you’re not beholden to the opinion of just one person. It’s like, ‘This is it, alright, bye.’ And then I can just get offstage and go to my room and get back in my bed.”

For another, she specifies that she’s an independent artist but not DIY, and certainly not “local.” She blanches at the term. “It feels condescending. I think a lot of artists have that feeling, particularly in Seattle. It sucks. There’s no industry here. We’re some of the lowest-paid artists in the entire country. I don’t want to be local to that, that’s awful. I don’t do this art for my health. This is a career for me.”

That’s not to say she’s not proud of her hometown or in awe of the other artists – acts like Ionic and Anna Thompson among them – who are trying to build pop up from the cottage industry it currently exists as in Seattle. Her ambitions just lie far outside the city’s boundaries. “I’m from here,” she insists. “I like to live here, my community’s here, and I’ve invested so much here.”

That being said, ARCHIE harbors no illusions about the general reception of pop music in Seattle’s scene. “When I first started making music, oh my god,” she chuckles. “If I said I made pop music I would just be laughed out of the room. No one here takes it seriously or sees it as actual work or art. But I put in far more effort into my shows than almost anyone I’ve seen, you know?”

“At the end of the day, it just pushes me to make better music and more engaging visuals,” she says. “I have no shortage of ideas. And I’m really grateful for all of the people who have seen me and supported me and have given me chances. It makes me want to make it here, you know?”

Photo by Gemma Cross.

Real pop music – the kind of pop music that has topped the chart for decades – takes a lot more work to perform than the average live band. All music has the capacity to capture the imagination through multimedia extravagance, but with pop, the extravagance is assumed. You go to a pop show destined to be dazzled by light, sound, color, and movement. For the genre’s sky-high expectations, even the most talented singer on a stage alone might not be enrapturing enough.

ARCHIE designs her shows to be spectacles where no expense is spared. Each element, from the costumes to the choreography of the backup dancers, is thoughtfully constructed and executed to its best. Yet that ambition clashes with her status as an independent artist, where her side hustles and hard-earned income all go toward funding her fantasies. “Those kinds of shows are really expensive to put on, and no one in Seattle will pay you,” she laments. “Unless it’s like a private event, or unless you have a big name outside of the city, it’s hard to be able to do those shows consistently. The pay does not match the input, you know?”

For her 2022 Block Party performance, that spectacle once again came at a cost. “I lost money when I played Block Party,” she clarifies before “Keep in mind, I had an eight-person crew that I had to pay out. I didn’t make anything from that performance. I literally had to pay.”

The scaffolding of Seattle’s appreciation for music is, arguably, still built on a foundation laid thirty years ago. Grunge, and its flawed argument for an “alternative” to mainstream music, remains Seattle’s greatest cultural export (that is, besides the earnest signer-songwriter folk of countless Sup Pop signees and beyond). By extension, the city’s local music scene continues to be defined by concepts neutered in the contemporary musical ecosystem – the “authenticity” of pain and strife, the “organic” feel of a guitar in hand, or the “realness” of vocals ripped from the throat.

And running parallel to that reliance on such ancient virtues is Seattle’s complicated relationship with its non-white artists, whose conquering of the nation’s attention over the last decade has been neatly ignored even by the city’s stalwart adjudicators. This includes the radio stations that proffer local talent to a national crowd, as well as the grant writers that foster it.

“My friends and I talk about this a lot,” says ARCHIE about the futility of applying for city art grants. “It feels like they only want to fund you if you talk about how horrible it is to be a person of color, or how hard it is to be a woman. Yes, it’s really challenging, but I don’t wanna have to tailor my art around what they want to fund. I don’t wanna do that. It’s boring.”

Photo by Gemma Cross.

Her resistance to those demands might go beyond artistic preservation. ARCHIE also graduated from Evergreen College with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics, specifically Heterodox Economics. In the process she received an extensive history lesson on the Western transition from feudalism to capitalism. That, plus the difficulty of getting art funded in America, has made her as cynical as anybody about the machinations of the industry, but with the knowledge of its centuries-long development to back it up.

“I don’t think we’re getting out of it, sadly,” she says about the burgeoning “antiwork” movement sweeping the nation. “People died fighting the concept of wage labor. Died. Many, many people, for hundreds of years. But here we are.”

Some are eager to dismiss critics of America’s economic climate as lazy. This description doesn’t apply at all to ARCHIE. For years, she’s hustled, invested, ventured, and negotiated her way to each performance, to every single release. She’s worked full-time service jobs, designed clothes and accessories, worked various side gigs, and even occasionally wrote freelance articles under a fake name. Recently she’s been contributing to a startup that does national gym music programming, and she’s also taken on part-ownership of a local restaurant.

“I’ve got hands in a lot of pots,” she concludes, “to help me do the one thing I really want to do.”

This knowledge makes the effort she channels into her performances feel far more meaningful, and it puts the relative dearth of her recorded output into perspective. Though she’s apparently close to releasing her debut full-length, and there’s also a tour in development, time and energy remain at a scarcity.

“Luckily I feel grateful that I enjoy doing it,” ARCHIE says about the hustle. “I do genuinely enjoy business. I enjoy growing things and making things, and as long as I can be in charge of myself, I like doing it. But it does really suck because then there’s not that much time for the art. This album could have been done like a year ago, but for a long time I was at the restaurant sixty hours a week and then doing another side hustle on top of that and then trying…you know, it’s just a lot of work. I feel like if you have the money then you don’t have the time, and if you have the time then you don’t have the money.

Whatever she does, it all flows toward her love of performing. “I have a need to be seen,” she summarizes. “It’s a human need. I wanna be seen and appreciated, and I wanna see people and appreciate them. That’s a big part of why I love performing. It’s a way for me to connect with people without having to…”

She pauses, then clarifies.

“It’s just hard for me to do one-on-one with someone. I am a performer, so what brings me out of my shell is people watching me. I’m an introvert who just comes alive when the eyes are on me.”